Established by order No. 3001 of the RSFSR Council of Ministers on August 9, 1965, opened its doors on June 29, 1966.
The initial core of the State Art Gallery’s collection (1,140 depository items) came from the Vladimir K. Arseniev Primorsky Regional History Museum, and included approximately 200 works of Russian and Western European art transferred to the museum in the 1930s from the State Museum Reserve, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage Museum, the State Russian Museum, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Pavlovsk Palace Museum, and others. The Primorsky State Art Gallery occupies part of a two-storey mansion (from 1985), originally built in 1903 for the Russo-Asiatic Bank, and the first storey of an apartment building in Vladivostok (at 12 Partizansky Avenue).
Overall area – 1,566.2 sq. m
Exhibition area – 854 sq. m
Storage area – 217 sq. m
The total number of museum depository items was 7,401 as of October 1, 2012
The key sections and current composition of the gallery art are: old Russian art, Russian art from the 18th – early 20th century, domestic (Soviet, Russian, including regional Primorsky) art of the 20th – early 21st century (paintings, drawings, sculpture, decorative and applied art), Western European and Far Eastern art. Western European art includes pieces created by masters hailing from Italy, Spain, Holland, Flanders, France, Germany, and other countries, with work by Jacopo Bassano, Jan Ravestein, Daniel Segers among them. The Russian art collection follows the history of art from the 16th through the early 20th century. Old Russian art is represented by a small, high quality collection of select icons dating from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, including some painted by Simon Ushakov. The Russian art collection from the 18th through the 1st half of the 19th century includes paintings by F.S. Rokotov, V.L. Borovikovsky, V.A. Tropinin, O.A. Kiprensky; the Russian art collection from the second half of the 19th century comprises paintings by I.N. Kramskoy, I.I. Shishkin, V.E. Makovsky, V.D. Polenov, I.K. Aivazovsky, and others. Works by big-name artists of the early 20th century representing a range of painting styles and schools of the period are the pride of the Primorsky State Art Gallery, including works by V.A. Serov, A.Ya. Golovin, K.A. Somov (The World of Art); P.V. Kuznetsov (A Blue Rose); A.V. Kuprin, R.R. Falk, A.V. Lentulova (A Jack of Diamonds) and others. Works by Marc Chagall and Vasily Kandinsky have a special place in the gallery’s collections. The gallery’s collection of domestic art from the 20th and early 21st century provides a pretty good idea of the key art trends in the Soviet and post-Soviet era.Of especial value are the works by artists from the 1920s – 1930s: L.S. Popova, V.V. Lebedev, R.R. Falk, A.V. Lentulov, A.A. Osmerkin, V.N. Palmov. The period from the 1960s through the 1980s has most complete representation, featuring works by P.P. Ossovsky, A.S. Papikyan, V.F. Stozharov, A.A. Plastov, the Tkachev brothers, and others. However, it is the works by Primorsky regional artists that are the bulk of the Primorsky Art Gallery’s contemporary art collection. Some of them are well known outside the Primorsky Region: Ivan V. Rybachuk, Kirill I. Shebeko, Anatoly V. Teleshov, Kim P. Koval, Alexander A. Pyrkov, Viktor A. Fedorov, Fedor M. Morozov, Gennady A. Omelchenko, Ryurik V. Tushkin, and others.
